The Decline of Raul Ibanez

I was recently given trial access to a great baseball database, which you can see used on a regular basis over at the Baseball Analytics blog. There is a multitude of data available to parse in almost any way, shape, and form. I was like a kid in a candy store. The first thing I wanted to analyze was the decline of Raul Ibanez, so that’s what I did.

Here’s an excerpt:

Having watched Ibanez in his time as a Phillie, I have noticed his problems with fastballs. At 38 years old, it seems like his bat speed has been in decline and thus has been rather helpless trying to make solid contact on fastballs. The following images show his in-play slugging percentage on fastballs, the first showing data from April 5 to June 13, 2009 and the second showing everything since.